


A Class Act

by Kikithehousemoose



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy, Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy, War & Peace (TV 2007), War and Peace (TV 2016)
Genre: Anatole Kuragin (mentioned) - Freeform, Arranged Marriage, Character Death, Divorce, F/M, Forced Marriage, Fyodor Dolokhov (mentioned), Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Sex, Other, Prince Vasily (mentioned), References to Depression, Unhappy marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 00:14:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13422612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kikithehousemoose/pseuds/Kikithehousemoose
Summary: A vent piece/character study about the union between Pierre Bezukhov and Helene Kuragina. Pierre-centric.





	A Class Act

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't actually read War and Peace yet, but I've watched all of the versions that this fic is categorized in. This fic is vague enough that it doesn't really lean towards any of them, and I know the timeline probably isn't linear. This is literally just a vent fic to get some thoughts down on paper. I didn't really have a goal while writing this, but I think I feel a bit better.

They both tried, at first. They really did.

 

The thing about Pierre was that he was an impressionable man. Idealistic, a dreamer. He searched everywhere for happiness, for meaning, so when he was more or less forced into a marriage, he looked for the best in the circumstance. He considered himself lucky, even. Helene was a gorgeous and esteemed woman, highly sought after. All the men around him hit him with laughing envy, telling him each time how honored he should be to get a hand like hers, to marry into the  _ Kuragins.  _

 

When he looked at her, his stomach fluttered strangely. His palms sweat. He felt cramped. All that he had read told him that these were the signs of love. He deduced, then, that he must be very in love with Helene. He must be head-over-heels obsessed with her. Even before they married, when she continued to slide herself into his life, his personal space, he must have been enchanted. He dreamed about her sometimes, spread out on his bed, waiting for him, his name on the tip of her plump, wet lips. He would embrace her, and she would guide him to perfection, and she would never call him ‘Count’. He was always ‘Pierre’, he was always ‘husband’, and sex with her merged with the feelings he had whenever he read about the glory of God.He would wake to coldness and nod to himself. Yes. Yes, he must be madly in love. It was the only explanation. 

 

Helene, too, did what she could to convince herself that she was having fun with this. The enjoyment she got from watching him squirm under her gaze, from having to guide him along their awkward attempt at a courtship, it  _ was  _ enjoyment, pure and true. The shadow of her father looming over the whole arrangement hardly registered with her anymore; her father’s eyes watched over everything she did, whether he ever mentioned it or not. Pierre wasn’t the men she  _ liked  _ to go after, but he was easy enough. He was soft, almost naive, and remarkably agreeable. She was a woman who thrived off of the simple pleasures that he barely gave a glance to, one who never wanted nor bothered to consider any of the deeper politics or philosophies that he was so known to busy himself with. She loved Pierre like she would love a puppy, full of a pitiful adoration at this senseless, immature creature. She was never  _ in  _ love with him, but she was more than happy to pretend if it satisfied her social expectations. She could even pretend in bed, if it made him feel better.

 

Pierre didn’t even realize he might be  _ afraid  _ of Helene until he had to bed her. Neither of them were interested in this part, truly, but they went through with it like the headstrong pretenders they were. It was not a pleasant experience. His hands shook as they caressed her, his eyes distant and unfocused despite her naked form being so close to him. She took off his glasses and kissed his fluttering eyelids, asking teasingly if he even knew what to do with a woman. His stomach filled with dread as he choked on his answer. He didn’t. He had dreamed of taking  _ her  _ to bed, but the reality was so different from the dream, so much harder and more intimidating. He felt ill. She did half the work to get either of them to a point resembling pleasure, and he had to hold onto the fleeting idea that she was enjoying this at all as he fought back a feeling of disgust. He thought this was supposed to come naturally. He was supposed to be lucky to be bedding a woman like her. He felt so, so far from lucky. He felt like a disappointment.

 

She had looked him in the eye not long afterwards, once she was cleaned and had taken other precautions. She said in a steady voice, with piercing, unyielding gaze: “I’ll have no children by you.” At first, he’d been confused. He thought she was barren. But no. It was  _ him.  _ She didn’t want children by anyone, but if she had a choice, they wouldn’t be by her own husband. He swallowed down objection. He nodded, and pretended to understand. No… he did understand. It was the second clue he had that this was not an arrangement of love or any kind of meaningful satisfaction. This was another role for her to play, another pawn to move on a board that he could see but never begin to understand. 

 

Still, he tries to love her. He doesn’t know what else to do. He peppers her with compliments. He holds her, he kisses her, he gets her gifts and grants her things. She takes them the same as she took any suitor; with advantage and hardly any heart. 

 

In the beginning, they appear together. Pierre accompanies her to the opera, to balls, to parties or gatherings of any kind. The conversation eludes him, but he can appreciate the art, the atmosphere. Sometimes gatherings that he gets dragged to are the only times he really feels alive,  _ truly  _ connected to his fellow man. It starts on the sidelines, not wanting to cause a scene, not wanting to embarrass his carefully treading wife, but after a number of drinks to drown his shyness, he can no longer help himself. He dances, he gets up to mischief, he takes dares. He lives like he’s still young, still chasing a naive happiness, still able to find a fire in the company of others. It’s different now, though, sometimes. More people laugh at him. More ladies whisper. Every so often, Helene will give him a different look. She usually seems to enjoy his antics, but other times not. Other times, she’ll cup his ear when they’re alone, as if she was his mother instead of his wife. “You are a  _ fool”  _ she would say with a smile, a smile he would come to know and doubt so well. He wondered how someone could smile so  _ coldly,  _ with so much contradiction. He wondered more what it was like to live as such a contradiction-- if his wife was even real, was even able to  _ be  _ happy.

 

What was different about Helene was that when she was dissatisfied, she lived  _ larger.  _ Any anger, anything that displeasured her, they were exaggerated and thrown into some kind of dinner party, some kind of grand gathering that she could spend her focus orchestrating. He noticed this more and more as her parlor became something of note, as more strangers entered his home and pretended to know him from somewhere before. “No” he would say “I am only Pierre. Count Bezukhov was my father”, yet they would have none of it. Pierre sees the fire of life burning in Helene, that kind with a dangerous stink, the kind that engulfs those who get too close until they have no hope of escaping or ever living the same again. She burns, only under her own control, feeding off of the breath of others success and selling it back to them in a thick, intoxicating smog. It was the kind of brewing passion that led rich men to wage wars, the kind that starved and destroyed and built new nations on the graves of broken promises. Helene, he discovered, was everything that he hated about Russia: a realization that shook him to his core. 

After that, he begins to lock himself in his room.

 

He couldn’t pinpoint a time when he fell out of love with her, if he ever was. But he does know that he looks up one day from his self-made pit of recluse and realizes that he had spent all this time becoming  _ nothing.  _ He looks to a candle at his side, and suddenly sees the whole candle, not just the flame reflected in the mirror. It’s as if the world suddenly refocuses around him, though he had no idea that he couldn’t see clearly beforehand. Unhappiness itches under his skin like drums. He becomes angry. He does not know anymore what he is angry at, but he is  _ furious.  _ At himself? At the world? At the men he could have been? At his wife? At his country? All of it. Everything.  _ Everything.  _ He hates it all. He’s always hated it. He loathes this… this  **life** that he’s become subject to ever since the day he had the misfortune of being born. He hates how much he’s wasted it-- no. He hates how much  _ others  _ are wasting it. He hates all these  _ puppets  _ he sees, all these  _ sheep,  _ these wooden marionettes that splinter each other when they embrace. It maddens him. He tries to read about it, he tries to speak about it, but no words that exist in the world can even begin to describe it. Frustration becomes as much of Pierre’s identity as his name, and he knows not where to turn. He drinks. He drinks. He drinks. He reads and drinks and convinces himself that there’s nothing more he can do. The world is sick and pathetic,  _ he  _ is sick and pathetic, and he will not interact with it if it continues to… to be like this. He doesn’t know what else to do. He doesn’t know if he can ever be happy.

 

He’s jealous of how Helene can just… continue existing. He’s seen the look in her eyes. The way she smiles, so thinly, so shallow. She’s no happier than him, but she lives more. She lives more than the both of them could together. She loves, too, more than Pierre wants to let himself. He doubts they love the same way, but she does love, nonetheless. It’s a new scandal every few months, and he wants to care. He really does. And sometimes he still does get angry. That Anger, it writhes in him like an infection, waiting for an opportunity to flare up and make him rash, make him a beast no better than the soldiers. He duels. He screams. He threatens violence. He threatens divorce. He doesn’t recognize himself when he’s like this, but he recognizes the fear he strikes in others. In Dolokhov. In Anatole. In his wife. He’s always met with anger, too, with retaliation, and of all the people he’s had angry with him, he hates that Helene is the person whose anger most resembles his. She’s so different from him, too different to be anything beyond civil, but also so horrendously  _ similar.  _ They’re so identical that it’s  _ ugly,  _ that they have no other choice but to accentuate their differences lest they fuse into each other, a cesspool of negativity and dissatisfaction. There’s a cloud that hangs over them when they’re sour together, one that they both see. One that they both try to dissipate by being apart.  _ This  _ is their union: protecting the world from the mess they could make together. Protecting each other from their organic unhappiness, from their increasingly mutual disgust. Pierre loves his wife in the way that one must learn to love an unflattering reflection in the mirror, so flawed and yet so true. He gets older, and he does not like to face her. He finally understands, he thinks, what she’s felt this entire time, and why she insisted on such distance between them. 

 

The separation comes as a surprise to no one. When it’s over, when it’s finalized, he hates himself for feeling so relieved. The fog has not lifted, and the world he sees is still ill, but he feels that much lighter, that much more free. It’s what’s best for both of them, he knows. Neither of them deserved to live in that  _ muck  _ of a marriage. He knows Helene will find another lover soon enough anyway, and he… well, he would find  _ something.  _

 

He cries for her when he learns that she’s died. But nothing more. Nothing more than tears and an appropriate amount of sorrow. An appropriate amount of disgust, of regret. He can only hope, the night after he learns, that she too was able to find freedom in love as he did. He hopes that, in the end, she too was able to be happy. That’s all he ever wanted for the both of them: to grasp that ever-elusive happiness. 


End file.
